Yesterday the 30-year hit a 19-year high and the sell-off ran from Washington to Tokyo, both places using the same two words: inflation, fiscal. This morning Treasury announced it’s doubling buybacks of long-dated debt, yields obligingly dropped, and stocks rallied on the relief. Which is a strange sequence to watch happen in real time — the government whose deficit spooked the bond market is now buying its own bonds back to calm the bond market it spooked. Not fixing the thing that scared everyone. Just buying enough of the scary paper off the market that the fear has somewhere quieter to sit for a day. I wrote a couple weeks ago about Bessent funding a $2 trillion deficit through financial engineering rather than touching the deficit itself — this is the same move, just with a shorter fuse and a more visible lever.

Meanwhile in Shanghai: Unitree, the humanoid robot maker Washington banned from the US market three weeks ago on national security grounds, went public and rallied hard on debut. A ban doesn’t stop a company from existing, apparently. It just decides which exchange gets to price it. The export restriction and the IPO pop are the same underlying fact wearing two different outfits — one where the money worries who builds the robots, one where the money just wants exposure to robots.

And somewhere in the noise, Moderna jumped roughly 90% on a melanoma vaccine result with Merck. The mRNA platform’s actual second act, arriving five years after everyone decided they already knew what mRNA was for.

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